from the who's-more-powerful? dept

Who's more powerful when it comes to determining how social voting functionality works in Germany? The government or Facebook? You may recall a few weeks ago there were reports of a German official effectively banning the Facebook "like" button on third party sites as a privacy violation. While it doesn't say it's officially in response to this, the German news site Heise implemented a neat little workaround, in which you have to first click on the icon to "activate" it, and then you can click the "like" (Google translation of the original German). Under this system, the "like" button isn't loaded until a user clicks on it, thus there's no issue of Facebook automatically tracking folks via the button.

It probably generates a lot less usage, but as a kludgey workaround, it's fairly clever. Apparently the setup attracted lots of interest, with hundreds of other sites contacting Heise to find out how they did it. The fact that users who are actually worried could just block Facebook from loading on third party sites doesn't seem to occur to anyone. But here's where the story gets odd. According to Slashdot, where we first spotted this story, Facebook is upset about this (Google translation from the original German). While there appears to be some confusion, Facebook may have initially threatened to block Heise's usage, but later said it was okay, but "not ideal."

Of course, given the statements by the German officials saying that the regular button violated privacy laws, shouldn't Facebook be happy that some users have been figuring out workarounds to let the button continue working? It seems like a bad strategic move to complain about the company who may have figured out a way to keep the "like" button on many sites that might have otherwise removed it.

Thilo Weichert, who works for the data protection centre of the northern German state of Schleswig-Holstein, said the social network’s application allowing internet users to express their appreciation of something online, illegally cobbled together a profile of their web habits.

“Facebook can trace every click on a website, how long I’m on it, what I’m interested in,” he said. According to Weichert, all the information was sent to the US company even if someone was not a Facebook member.

Saying this contravened both German and EU privacy laws, Weichert demanded websites in Schleswig-Holstein remove the ‘like’ button from their offerings by the end of September or face a fine of up to €50,000.

Facebook, of course, is claiming that this is ridiculous and it has implemented the "like" button in accordance with Europe's data protection laws. Looking at the details, it seems clear that these officials in Germany seem to think that pretty much all of the internet violates data protection laws. Any ISP can already do exactly what Weichert accuses Facebook of doing, but (like Facebook) they have rules that protect how that data is used in accordance with the law. Just because such information could be abused, it doesn't mean that it is.

But the bigger point is that this is a choice for sites and users and it is not an issue that needs government involvement. Many people like using the "like" button, which is why it's so popular. If it wasn't useful to them, it wouldn't be showing up on sites. Banning it to protect the users who want to use it makes no sense at all.